https://www.siliconvalley.com/2024/11/23/flam-quantify-everything-hurting-decisions/

A paper published last month in the journal PNAS shows that numbers are so compelling that when making a decision, people will put more weight on relatively trivial attributes if they’re expressed numerically, factoring them in above more relevant information expressed in qualitative form. The researchers call the phenomenon “quantification fixation.”

“I think it helps explain why there’s such a move to put a number on everything,” said Katherine Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the paper. For example, think of online purchases — it’s so much easier to compare customer star ratings than to sort through a bunch of descriptive reviews. Right up top, Amazon gives you not just the average rating as a number and a graphic, but also gives you the number of ratings.